The
NVIDIA AGEIA PhysX Acquisition Q&A on FiringSquad talks with NVIDIA's Derek
Perez about the acquisition of AGEIA, a fellow all-caps hardware company. He
uses the same "heterogeneous computing model" phrase used yesterday to announce
the move (story), an interesting take, since it sounds like they
plan to homogenize AGEIA's PPU onto their GPUs, saying "Physics is a natural for
processing on the GPU." As for existing stand-alone PhysX cards, he says: "We
will continue to support the current line of Ageia products that are on the
market today."

It's clear you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no way a 10 year old computer is going to be doing a real time physics engine, even by itself for a game with a significant number of dynamic objects(vehicles, props, rag dolls, etc). If it were as cheap as you pretend it to be it would have been used in games much sooner. There is nothing cheap or simple about the computational complexity of solving that stuff at 60-100hz.

Physics in games is still in its infancy is the entire point of this conversation. There is still a lot of areas that have yet to be explored. As power increases so will the usage of more complex areas of physics, in the same way that graphics have progressed leaps and bounds as a result of more processing power available to it.

The basic math behind motion, acceleration, momentum are simple. The expensive part of physics is the collision detection and resolution. In more complex physical simulations, like cloth, the cost is huge. Too much for modern games to really take full advantage of. Just because you two are blind to the aspects of physics that games desire to use, doesn't mean there isn't any.